The Supreme Court ruled on Monday in a decision that could only be described in three letters starting with W and ending with F, to give police the final authority to authorize strip-searches of people arrested for any offense. Broken tail light? Bend over and spread ’em. That goes for you too, Deadbeat Dad, shoplifting cat food granny and the rest of you guilty-until-proven-innocent 99 percenters. Bend over, squat and cough. Your body is the new battleground in the “War on Terror” and the 13 million of you arrested each year are now dungeon fodder play things for uniformed goons on the public payroll. Where once we asked for your cooperation, we now demand your abject humiliation. So if you’re getting any funny ideas about venturing out of the unheated comfort of your soon to be foreclosed upon home, whether it’s to drive with an expired license to the food bank, or more criminally, decide to exercise your democratic right to assemble in the vicinity of a rich person, be prepared not just for water cannons and rubber bullets, but a full-on finger raping by the ever lengthening arms of the law, whose weapons now perform double duty as lethal sex toys.
Your government (or whatever you call the publicly funded entity that exists wholly and unabashedly to ensure the unimpeded transfer of the nation’s wealth into the select coffers of the gangsters on its payroll and their corporate cronies) wants to fuck you. There’s no other way of putting it. They want to fuck you in the worst possible way. Literally, lewdly and above all, painfully. Think joyless dungeon master/camp guard giving your genitals the taser treatment kind of painful. You realize, of course, under your tormenter’s pleather gimp suit is some blandly visaged, pot-bellied technocrat hoping to be home in time to watch NCIS with the wife while you are left to whimper in your restraints.
Once content to “screw” you, or just fuck you over, our “elected” oligarchs have now upped the bar on their depraved appetite for torture porn with a ready army of doctors, soldiers, law enforcement officials and airport screeners to carry out their perverse handiwork. We can now add the judiciary at its highest level to this motley mix of state-sanctioned sex offenders.
It’s bad enough that air travelers have to submit a XXX-Ray or a rough probing molestation by TSA officials to ensure the absence of explosive contraband in their hoo-hoos, or that abortion seekers in some states are forcibly raped with sonic dildos. You thought that Republican presidential candidates making misogyny and homophobia the centerpiece of their campaign trail hate speech was reason enough to fear for an encroaching Idiocracy ruled over by a posse of evil clowns. Now comes the crowning jewel of a full-blown gulag police state in the form of a rubber gloved, raised finger salute to the Bill of Rights and all the other shredder-ready old documents that once served to pre-empt the abuse of power and provide the checks and balances necessary to maintain a republic. The vigilance of The Founding Fathers is clearly no match for the brain trust who brought us the Gaza strip, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay. That the puerile raunch one associates with ‘gonzo’ and straight-to-DVD ‘grindhouse’ porn now serves as blueprints for law enforcement and social engineering in the age of ‘Hope’ is just something else to choke on like a rubber gag ball restraint.
In the swinging, wife-swapping spirit of ‘bipartisanship’, five Republican and four Democratic appointees have proven they have bigger fish to fry than upholding some shredder-ready old document. By adding DWD (Driving While ‘Do-Able’) to the roster of punishable offenses like DWB (Driving While Black) law enforcement will have even further impetus to be discerning, heat packing meat graders deciding which ‘cuts’ to inspect for the mildest of infractions. Giving police free rein to play the Officer Frisky role in ‘Caged Cuties III’ is just one of the many (and hardly unintended) outcomes of a legal amendment meant to pre-empt civil strife in the event of more robust ‘Occupy’ or anti-war movements. Or should any of the “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” among the 99-ers finally realize that their humiliation will follow them to the grave and rise up, zombie style to snack on their former overlords as if they were delicious ‘pink slime’ school lunches. In which case, the Supreme Court is ready to rubber stamp into law anything to remove existing legal or constitutional impediments to a scorched-earth policy of zero tolerance to dissent. Constitutional safeguards like the 4th Amendment and all its blah-blah-blahing about unreasonable searches and seizures be damned.
What US leaders openly encourage overseas in the form of civil disobedience, they will not tolerate at home. An ‘Arab Spring’ for our colonial subjects overseas, whose dissent we can work into a neo-liberal framework and impose austerity and military rule later on. For American dissenters, even ones who express an anti-authoritarian bent with a broken bicycle bell, its a swift jack boot to the genitals.